


Lookout Point

by arpent



Category: Mars Trilogy - Kim Stanley Robinson
Genre: Antarctica, Depression, F/M, First Kiss, Pining, Very slight reference to child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 01:19:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17694854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arpent/pseuds/arpent
Summary: It was a code, in their little society. There were, of course, reasons to go hiking that had to do with science, or beautiful views, or mental well-being, but the fact remained that saying “x and y went on a hike together” meant a very particular thing, and Sax couldn't fail to understand it.





	Lookout Point

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luzula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luzula/gifts).



Most of the Mars candidates had gone all the way out to Lake Bonney on a camping trip, with just a few left on maintenance duty at the station. The rooms were quiet at 3 A.M. when Ann got up from her bunk to have a phone meeting with her grad student in Cornell, the last one she would be shepherding through graduation before hopefully leaving her teaching duties for good. But after the call was finished, she heard a clicking noise coming from the direction of the station kitchen, faintly audible above the vibration of the station walls in the perpetual Dry Valley winds. Sax sat at the table with his laptop open, scanning through some data. That made two of them who were ignoring the psychologists’ recommendations, letting their sleeping hours erode under the power of the Antarctic summer light.

People did complain about the light, though not as much as they had about last winter’s darkness, and never enough to suggest that the person was experiencing serious psychological problems. Ann had finally figured out that light, in its superabundance or lack thereof, was a socially acceptable shorthand, a substitute for deeper griefs that had to be hidden from the selection committee. There must be people, for example, who came from close-knit families, who missed them terribly. Ann mind shied away from the thought, but she knew they existed. But that would poison your chances for Mars, you would be winnowed out on the next round. So you had to laugh and say, sorry, it must be the light it makes us all irritable, don’t mind me, it’s nothing personal.

Ann used the trick too, once she understood it, although by her own choice she’d had no family since she was eighteen, and she doubted the dark winter really affected her. Amusing, how her depression could protect her this way. The moods of black despair, the numbness, dissociation from her emotions, everything she’d fought so hard to keep out of the paperwork, had come round to serve her at last. Whatever damage the light was doing to her (and the effect had been studied scientifically), it must be happening in the part she no longer felt.

But: _It’s the worst, to be this disoriented!_ she always agreed.

Ann had meant to go back to her room and start reading her student’s thesis chapter, but as soon as she saw Sax she stepped into the kitchen. She was helpless not to. And this was one of the signs by which she knew she had a crush, the others being that when she was alone she imagined long conversations with him, and that her face started smiling when she saw him, until he opened his mouth at least and was inevitably _wrong_ about everything. She’d experienced these symptoms before, and had even let them get her into some awkward situations, back when she was younger and her unhappiness felt more desperate. But her brain, cunning enemy that it was, persisted in suggesting that Sax was something new and special.

He was more comfortable with science than with people, it was obvious in the awkward way he started to extricate himself whenever a conversation became personal. The ordinary gossip of station life was agony to him. And since he was emotionally inept himself, Sax would never belittle Ann for her ineptitude. He was safe that way, and safety counted for a lot. He and Ann could have a relationship—in her head, it was so easy—operating purely through science. Science, the only thing she’d ever loved that had never transformed into abusive shit.

“Hello, Ann,” Sax said, blinking at her in the kitchen doorway. “Do you, do you want coffee?” He peered around, looking for a mug and not seeing one. He had the slightest stammer, which no one but Ann seemed to notice. She’d mentioned it to Nadia, one of the few people whose company didn’t send Ann’s body into fight or flight mode, and Nadia had been surprised and sceptical. Sax always sounded so polished to her. Ann never brought it up again to anyone. She hoarded the knowledge instead, like a treasure belonging to her alone. Oh yes, a bad crush, a positive soup of irrationality!

I’m going to do something about it, she thought, as she thanked Sax and began to look for a mug in the drying rack beside the little sink. Today. I’ll ask him to go on a hike.

That was the code, in their little society. There were, of course, reasons to go hiking that had to do with science, or beautiful views, or mental well-being, but the fact remained that saying “x and y went on a hike together” meant a very particular thing, and Sax could not fail understand it.

I’ll ask him right now, while there’s only the two of us, Ann thought, though she’d made similar resolves before and done nothing. Everyone knew that Sax had gone on a hike with Tatiana Durova, who was movie-actress beautiful and, significantly, did not tower over him by four scowling inches. But Ann poured her coffee and sat down across from him. She couldn’t not; the thesis chapter was going to go unread and that was all there was to it. “How is your data?” she asked. She knew that asking would make her happy, and apparently she was so unused to that sensation that she would tumble into it over and over again, like a humourless pratfall.

Sax’s eyes lifted from his computer screen, sharpening. “These albedo maps are rich with information,” he said. “Nothing at all like our model predicted.” A minute pause while to check whether she was truly interested. She leaned forward, and he tilted the screen to show her. “This talus field is, we believe, the most Mars-like. We’ll use it for an index.”

“What’s the mineral composition?”

He told her, and they tinkered with a few model parameters. Sax soaked up her opinions and deferred to expertise without the slightest ego. Intellectually generous. A good scientist. Beside her she could feel the morning warmth of his body through the ratty thermal wear that was the indoor uniform in Antarctica. There was spray of wrinkles at the corner of his eye, unique as a thumbprint.

“We should hike up and see the talus ourselves,” she said. She said it fast, deliberately tricking herself so she could get it out before she felt its significance. A deep breath and then, too aggressively: "Let’s go on a hike.”

The retreat was instant and total. His face became as distant as a statue. She knew from the heated sensation that her own face had turned a particularly ugly red colour. One more bad thing that happened on Earth. Put it in a box with the rest, leave it behind, all of it, you’ll be on another planet and it won’t matter. But Sax would be on Mars too, impossible to escape.

Focus on how lucky she’d been this time. Sax was so insensible to the little eddies of the stations gossip. Ann might disgust him, but he wouldn’t expose her to the circling jackals. She needed to remember that she was lucky.

With his eyes fixed on the data transformation that he was still doing on his computer screen, Sax said in a remote voice, “ _Karen_.” It was the name of the woman from the selection committee whose bedroom was a few metres away down the hall. Ann was at a loss. Was Sax interested in a committee member? It seemed like an uncharacteristically stupid way for him to torpedo his chances.

Oh. _Oh._ People who were used to conducting love affairs—people who were not Ann, obviously—had techniques for doing it under the radar, for avoiding a splashy blowout like that Russian couple had caused. Sax was telling her yes, he was just saying he wanted to be discreet.

Ann’s heart began to pound. Fight or flight.

“I’ll take my breakfast and start walking now,” she said, thinking as she talked. “There are some lovely pegmatites up at Lookout Point. I might take some samples. Wander around a few hours.”

“I should finish this analysis while my ideas are fresh,” Sax said. “In a few hours I’ll probably want to stretch my legs.”

“Good. That’s good.” He still hadn’t made eye contact, still tapped at his keyboard. “Thanks for the coffee Sax.”

“You’re w-welcome,” he stammered.

#

An assignation, Ann thought in her room, throwing on her warm clothes. It was only ten below zero outside the station, but the windchill on Lookout Point would be intense. She had an assignation. “Holy hell,” she said aloud, a phrase that she remembered her father using in his good moods. How terrified she’d been, as a little girl, whenever he smiled that way.

No. Put that in the box and close the lid on it. She was on another planet, somehow, this couldn’t possibly still be Earth. These things didn’t happen to her.

Unless she’d misunderstood everything and Sax really had been talking about stretching his legs.

#

The misunderstanding seemed more and more likely as Ann puttered around the ridge below Lookout Point. She resisted looking at her watch. The pegmatites were indeed beautiful, some feldspar crystals walnut-sized or bigger. She had her hammer with her, but she didn’t collect any samples. It was enough to see them in the place where they’d formed.

Thankfully, she got absorbed in what she was doing, so much that she didn’t even pause to tuck her hair back under her cap when the wind loosened it. She missed hearing Sax’s hail until he was only a few metres away. She turned, strands of hair plastering over her eyes and mouth, and saw his cheeks pink from the wind. That’s when she noticed she was already smiling.

They hiked the last distance together. It was a cloudless day, like every day in the Dry Valleys. You could see the northern part of McMurdo from here, the biggest station on Antarctica, a sprawling village almost, but like no other village on Earth. Squint, and you could be already on Mars. The lookout point itself had a small weather station consisting of an antenna, a whirring anemometer, and a plywood chest for maintenance equipment, which people usually used as a bench.

They sat. The wind was flowing up from the stony valley, washing Ann’s face like cool water. They were already deep in conversation. When she was away from Sax and tying herself in knots of anxiety, she forgot how easy this part was. The words just flowed when she was with him.

“Giving Mars a biosphere increases its, its organizational complexity,” he was saying, but his frown told her that he wasn’t just hammering on a fixed opinion. He was thinking this through _with_ her, even though the whole direction of his thoughts was nonsense. “That increase in net order, that’s the point of science.”

“No, no.” She started to laugh. “How can you say that? The point of science is to _know_. Destroying a planet is antithetical to science!”

He frowned again, and she reached out to grasp his shoulder. But somewhere in the centimetres between them the gesture went wrong. It seemed planned and awkward, although it hadn’t been; it had been a pure impulse, because he was listening to her, because he cared about what she cared about. But as her hand landed on his shoulder, Sax jumped.

It had been a misunderstanding after all. This wasn’t his thing. Or _she_ wasn’t, who knew. Poor, malfunctioning, too-tall flesh. Ann yanked the hand back and kneaded it against her thigh. The fingertips were going numb, damage from last winter’s frostbite; and she knew her brain well enough to know that the emotional numbness would also be worse because of her pre-existing damage. She was a walking disaster. It was for the best that Sax wasn’t interested, probably.

Sax kept blinking and frowning. His attention, which up until this moment had made her thrum with happiness, now seemed to flay her raw. It didn’t stop. He was too close. He was leaning in.

He was kissing her. Both of them were wearing their gloves. There were only a few places where bare skin was touching, lips, nose and cheekbones, so chilled that at first it didn’t feel like skin at all. And then everything was warm, warm, warm.

#

The walk back was quiet. A little chillier, since the sun had rolled around the horizon and disappeared behind the Olympus Range. They didn’t start talking about Mars again, though Ann was thinking about it. What did it mean that she was still imagining conversations with him, even when he was right beside her? More wires crossed in her brain no doubt, probably because the things that Mars and Sax made her feel, the upwelling of promise and apprehension, were so nearly identical that it could not fail to set off a deep warning, in that place she had sealed away. To love something and to destroy it are so close, or at least they were for her. An abused child’s conviction that fairness wouldn’t apply, that the laws of the universe were different for her and never to her benefit.

“There’s your talus,” he said, pointing, and took his pyranometer from his pocket so he could measure the solar radiation. “These are g-granitic?”—peering up at her to check he’d gotten it right. Her stammer. Her Sax.

He had listened to her, but he hadn’t changed his mind. But he will, she thought. Once we’re really there, once we’re standing on a new world, he has to.

###

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am so sorry, but I'm pretty sure they're going to get to Mars and have an epic break-up, and then slowly watch almost everyone they've ever loved die around them, and finally reconcile on a boat in the middle of a storm when they're nearly two hundred years old. Because if there is anything these books taught us it is that the person you can't help loving more than anything will also be your ideological opponent; cf. Nadia and Arkady, Maya and Frank.


End file.
